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FBI: New Scam Includes Denial-Of-Service Attacks To Cell Phones & Landlines
05/12/2010
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YWN News Desk
Have you recently received a large number of strange and unexplained calls on your mobile or landline telephones? The FBI is warning consumers about a new scheme that uses telecommunications denial-of-service attacks as a diversion to what is really happening: the looting of bank and online trading accounts!
The Scheme
The scheme is known as telephony denial-of-service (TDOS) and according to several telecommunications companies working with the FBI, there has been a recent surge of these attacks in the past few weeks. The perpetrators are suspected of using automated dialing programs and multiple accounts to overwhelm the land and cell phone lines of their victims with thousands of calls. When the calls are answered, the victim may hear anything from dead air (nothing on the other end), an innocuous recorded message, an advertisement! The calls are typically short in duration but so numerous that victims have had to have their numbers changed to make the calls stop.
The FBI has determined that these calls serve as a diversionary technique. During these TDOS attacks, online trading and other money management accounts are being accessed by the perpetrators who are transferring funds out of those accounts. The perpetrators will obtain account information of their victims in some way and then contact the financial institutions to change their victims' profile information such as email addresses, telephone numbers and bank account numbers. The purpose of the malicious phone calls is to occupy the victim phone numbers on record with the financial institutions managing the accounts so that when the institutions contact the victim to verify the changes and transactions, the institution is unable to reach the victim. Consequently, the victim has no idea what has really transpired until it's too late.
Read the full article at TheYeshivaWorld.com... |
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